(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic device, especially an electronic device to which Chinese characters can be input.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
The mobile phone is almost the most popular hand-held electronic device presently. People can communicate or talk with others by using the mobile phone, and they can also deliver electronic messages at any time to inform others. Since message delivering by using the mobile phone is quick and cost saving, it becomes popular with most mobile phone users.
To satisfy different kinds of mobile phone users, there're various kinds of Chinese input methods. Chinese input in the electronic device is quite different from English input, for the Chinese has 37 phonetic symbols and five tones in character notations. To allot these 37 phonetic symbols and 5 tones into the keyboard or keypad of the device is definitely not easy.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art 10 for inputting the phonetic symbols. As shown in FIG. 1, 37 phonetic symbols are allotted evenly into numeral keys. A user can select any phonetic symbol by pressing the respective key. For example, we can select the phonetic symbol −” by pressing the #5 key twice.
FIG. 2A˜FIG. 2C show the same prior art screen in processing the input of phonetic symbols. To input the Chinese character “” (or phonetically symbolized as  ) for example, the numeral key “5” shown in FIG. 1 is pressed once to have part of the display screen 20 show the first phonetic symbol “”, and at the same time the bottom of the screen 20 shows all the characters that include the phonetic symbol “”. Then, press the numeral key “0” of FIG. 1 twice to have the phonetic symbol combination of “” shown on the screen 21, and at the same time the bottom of the screen changes again to show all possible characters having the phonetic symbols “” (as shown in FIG. 2B). By moving the cursor along the character list, the user of the mobile phone can finally find the desired character “” and add the character into the message (as shown in FIG. 2C). Thereafter, a new search on a particular character can be started. However, there're always a lot of characters in a Chinese message, and finding characters one by one by phonetic symbol combinations and cursor moving is definitely time-consuming and inconvenient.
To improve the above situation, there is another phonetic input method which has a particular association function. FIG. 3 shows how the association function works. While the character “” is inputted, the bottom of the screen shows some characters which can follow the character “” to form a meaningful connection, and then the user can choose the next character quickly if the next character is already shown.
The phonetic symbol input described above is not the only way to input the Chinese characters. Inputting characters by stroke ordering or by English phonetic symbols are also well-known. However, since people in Taiwan or in Chinese world are familiar to learn Chinese by phonetic symbols, the aforesaid character input by phonetic symbol grouping is still the mainstream.
Therefore, to ease the difficulty in inputting Chinese characters is necessary and important.